I personally think “AAAAAAAA” is an entirely rational reaction to this question. :)
Not sure I fully agree with the comment you reference:
AI is probably what ever amount of conscious it is or isn’t mostly regardless of how it’s prompted. If it is at all, there might be some variation depending on prompt, but I doubt it’s a lot.
Consider a very rough analogy to CoT, which began as a prompting technique that lead to different-looking behaviors/outputs, and has since been implemented ‘under the hood’ in reasoning models. Prompts induce the system to enter different kinds of latent spaces—could be the case that very specific kinds of recursive self-reference or prompting induce a latent state that is consciousness-like? Maybe, maybe not. I think the way to really answer this is to look at activation patterns and see if there is a measurable difference compared to some well-calibrated control, which is not trivially easy to do (but definitely worth trying!).
And agree fully with:
it’s a weird situation when the stuff we take as evidence of consciousness when we do it as a second order behavior is done by another entity as a first order behavior
This I think is to your original point that random people talking to ChatGPT is not going to cut it as far as high-quality evidence that shifts the needle here is concerned—which is precisely why we are trying to approach this in as rigorous a way as we can manage: activation comparisons to human brain, behavioral interventions with SAE feature ablation/accentuation, comparisons to animal models, etc.
Good point about AI possibly being different levels of conscious depending on their prompts and “current thought processes”. This surely applies to humans. When engaging with physically complex tasks or dangerous extreme sports, humans often report they feel almost completely unconscious, “flow state”, at one with the elements, etc
Now compare that to a human sitting and staring at a blank wall. A totally different state of mind is achieved, perhaps thinking about anxieties, existential dread, life problems, current events, and generally you might feel super-conscious, even uncomfortably so.
Mapping this to AI and different AI prompts isn’t that much of a stretch…
I personally think “AAAAAAAA” is an entirely rational reaction to this question. :)
Not sure I fully agree with the comment you reference:
Consider a very rough analogy to CoT, which began as a prompting technique that lead to different-looking behaviors/outputs, and has since been implemented ‘under the hood’ in reasoning models. Prompts induce the system to enter different kinds of latent spaces—could be the case that very specific kinds of recursive self-reference or prompting induce a latent state that is consciousness-like? Maybe, maybe not. I think the way to really answer this is to look at activation patterns and see if there is a measurable difference compared to some well-calibrated control, which is not trivially easy to do (but definitely worth trying!).
And agree fully with:
This I think is to your original point that random people talking to ChatGPT is not going to cut it as far as high-quality evidence that shifts the needle here is concerned—which is precisely why we are trying to approach this in as rigorous a way as we can manage: activation comparisons to human brain, behavioral interventions with SAE feature ablation/accentuation, comparisons to animal models, etc.
Good point about AI possibly being different levels of conscious depending on their prompts and “current thought processes”. This surely applies to humans. When engaging with physically complex tasks or dangerous extreme sports, humans often report they feel almost completely unconscious, “flow state”, at one with the elements, etc
Now compare that to a human sitting and staring at a blank wall. A totally different state of mind is achieved, perhaps thinking about anxieties, existential dread, life problems, current events, and generally you might feel super-conscious, even uncomfortably so.
Mapping this to AI and different AI prompts isn’t that much of a stretch…